Hunter Johnston Interviewer: Dr. Charles Hughes Location
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Date: 2016-07-22 Interviewee: Hunter Johnston Interviewer: Dr. Charles Hughes Location: Rhodes College, Memphis, TN Collection: Memphis LGBT Oral Histories Notes: QC by Ozakh Ahmed 6/2017 [0:00] Charles Hughes: Alright, so we are here at Rhodes College. It is July 22nd, 2016 and we are joined by Hunter Johnston. Thank you so much for coming in and being a part of this today. Hunter Johnston: Thank you for inviting me. Hughes: Oh yeah, our pleasure. I was wondering if we could just start… talk about your early life, where you came from, and then what your early life was like. Johnston: Born and raised here in Memphis; raised Presbyterian. Fortunately didn’t hear a lot of anti-gay sermons. It was other subjects… very much in the closet of course, I knew from an early age I was different. A lot of gay men thought I was one of very few people who was thinking the way that I was thinking. In college… realized that there might be a few more. And I was recently asked by a younger cousin, “What did you major in?” and I said “Well I really majored in staying out of Vietnam.” And he said “Well, couldn’t you have just told them you were queer and that would?” and I said “Yeah I could have.” And this may be a concept [1:00] that people today don’t really appreciate, but it was more frightening to come out of the closet than to admit you were a homosexual, and because that was… you might get killed in war, but if you came out of the closet you probably lost your family, your friends, and any possibility of a decent job down the road, that was like a life sentence. So, most of us wouldn’t have considered coming out of the closet just to keep from going to Vietnam. Which kind of… I think kind of balances how hard it was to come out of the closet. Hughes: Right. Johnston: The number of years, I just, stayed in the closet, and it wasn’t until ’77 in Dade County Florida I was having a big to-do about an amendment down there and Anita Bryant got all on “Save Our Children!,” you know. And I was like, you know… hmmm… maybe, you know, there must be a few more of us than I thought there were and, you know, it might be worth stepping out of my closet. And for the first time I went to a gay bar… George’s on Madison, which was a show bar. [2:00] And a lot of liberal-minded straight people would go there to see the shows, so I knew about it. And I circled the block a few times, and went in and ordered a scotch on the rocks which was my drink at the time, and they said “You must be from out of town,” because it was a beer bar. And I said “Sure, I’m from out of town.” You know? I realized after I’d been there for a little while, and I thought “Wow, I’m comfortable here, I’m surrounded by people like me. I don’t have to pretend. I don’t have to hide and needless to say I went back a few more times and that was a slow beginning but, ’79, just a few years later, by then I had established a small circle of friends and someone told me that there was… a political group was forming. Some guys had come down from Maryland and were appalled at the situation in the Mid-South and they had started a group called the Tennessee Gay Coalition for Human Rights. And the second meeting was going to be at the home of a friend of mine who had just bought a house [3:00] and didn’t have any furniture in this big old shaped living room dining room and they were all going to sit on the floor and have this meeting, and I attended and the next thing I knew I had signed on the dotted line to go to Washington D.C. that October of ’79 and march in the first National March for Gay Rights. So, I went from, in just two years’ time, from taking a toe out of the closet, and suddenly I’m marching down Pennsylvania Avenue and I had an appointment with my Congressman in my name which kind of threw him off because he wasn’t expecting to have eight or nine gay men in suits, all employed and all college educated suddenly showing up and saying “you know we’d like to have equal rights.” Robin Beard, at the time, I remember he got up after he realized why were there and opened the door to the outer office, he didn’t really want to be stuck in the room with all those people. Of course he was amazed to find out he has constituents like us. I remember we met [4:00] with an aide to Senator Baker at the time, who was much more accepting and understanding. We didn’t get to see Senator Baker, but… so that was, we thought, it was effective. Didn’t make a whole lot of difference back then. As the years went on, of course we had other marches. I had to miss the 2000 march, I had reservations for a hotel, got sick, gave my reservation to a friend, and I remember I’m lying in bed coughing and the phone rings and the hotel is like “Can we really give your reservation away?” because rooms were kind of at a premium and four or five people I think piled into my room. But I did get to go on the most recent one of today, in 2009. I remember there was a man my age walking around with a big sign that said “I can’t believe I have to be here again.” And I thought, “Yeah I can understand that, I was here thirty years ago, I told you I wanted equal rights and I don’t really have them yet, so here I am again thirty years later marching down Pennsylvania Avenue again.” Hughes: Wow… [5:00] So much to… so much to think through there… taking you back to your younger days. You said that it was really sort of Anita Bryant and the Dade County controversy that really made you aware of the prominence of the gay community, had you been aware before that, had you been aware of other gay folks? Did you have a sense of a community or did you feel that you were alone? Johnston: I felt very much alone. I think even at an early age you have what we call “gaydar.” You get a sense that somebody else might be kind of going through what you’re going through, but… for the most part you… that was frightening because you were afraid if you… you certainly didn’t ask someone like you know… “Hey”… you know. And I would later learn after I came out, there was a phrase called “friends of Dorothy.” You could say “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” and straight people around you wouldn’t know what you were talking about but that was a way of saying “Are you gay?” Of course gay wasn’t a word until…to me until the 70s. [6:00] I mean there was queer, pervert, and other words that you didn’t like, you know, so you tried to avoid it but... Yes, it was a slow awareness. In ’69, in June, when Stonewall happened, I was oblivious to it. That was the summer between my freshman and sophomores years in college. I remember working that summer and it wasn’t newsworthy here. I had no way of knowing about it. I mean a gay rebellion in New York City simply wasn’t news in the Mid-South. In fact it wouldn’t be until probably end of the ‘70s and talking other people like myself and they go “Did you know there was this, you know, big moment in New York City in ’69?” and it was a revelation, you know, people could actually fight back and do something about it, but that had never crossed my mind until then, so I was oblivious to what was going on. And it was in the ‘70s like, during that [7:00] period getting involved with the Tennessee Gay Coalition for Human Rights. That was supposed to be a state-wide organization, and Tennessee is a very long state and we had to drive up to Nashville usually for meetings. That didn’t last long. So each chapter ended up getting their own charter and we had the Memphis Gay Coalition. I was active with them for a number of years. We had a march every year from ’81 on. I think it was in ’94 that Dennis Kijowski came up with the idea to make it a parade which was a lot more entertaining, it was a lot more fun, but it was either a march or a parade every year. Some years it was a very short parade. I remember one year, the short parade, I forget what year it was, but we went out of one entrance of Overton Park half a block down and went back in the other entrance. The budget was low and just couldn’t have a very long parade, but there was a parade.